Journal of Academic Development and Education JADE Issue 9 | Page 32

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Author Dr. Sarah Aynsley DOI http://dx.doi.org/10.21252/ KEELE-0000024 Contact [email protected] Keele University Abstract Tasks which are solely formative sometimes suffer from a lack of student engagement, however these tasks are often included to teach students essential skills and the intended benefit is in engaging with the process not necessarily the finished outcome. In this study a traditional task (five minute PowerPoint presentation on cancer treatments) was replaced with a creative approach to encourage engagement. The hypothesis was that by giving the students creative free rein to choose their topic and presentation method they would engage more fully with the process. The groups were told to select a topic related to cancer which they thought had made a significant contribution to our understanding, diagnosis or treatment and present it in whatever means they felt was most suitable for the topic. The result was enhanced engagement and effort in developing and delivering the presentation. The students also appeared more confident and knowledgeable when answering questions related to their topic. This pilot study suggests that free rein to be creative in formative tasks may encourage students to engage more fully with the process and develop enhanced skills. Introduction Student engagement can be defined by the time, energy and resources that the individual puts into a task that they are given; often we see that this is driven by the relationship of the task to assessment stakes with increasing engagement directly proportional to how high stakes the assessment is (Holmes, 2017). When a piece of work or session is solely formative with no subsequent summative follow up there can be observed a large diversity in the effort that a student gives to the piece and process, with many students exhibiting surface learning to meet the requirements of the task (McMahon 2006). These formative tasks are often included in teaching not as a means to produce a finished piece but to provide an opportunity to engage in learning a process and providing an opportunity for self-assessment of performance, which the student can then learn from to improve their practice at the next occasion (Nicol & Macfarlane-Dick 2006). In essence the true merit of the process is in the process itself not the final outcome; however encouraging students to engage in these opportunities to the best of their ability can often be difficult particularly early in a course. This paper describes one such formative group activity originally designed as a first introduction to researching and presenting information for first year medical students. The task was formative and embedded into a unit on cancer. The students were asked to work in their problem based learning groups (10-12 students) to produce a 5 minute presentation on either the diagnosis or treatment of a certain type of cancer which they would then present to their peers and a small number of staff (3-4) and answer questions about. The feedback for the task was a written summary of the presentation slides, oral delivery and responses to the questions. The main purpose of the session was to engage the students in thinking about how to research and present information orally. For many this would be the first time in which they had to present in this format formally to a moderate number of people (~130). However the quality of the presentations was often variable and consisted of slides with high levels of text, poor verbal communication and a general lack of knowledge on the subject, which could be seen when the students were posed questions. During the period of the task students were still engaged in their usual module work and from anecdotal evidence and conversations with groups, they were putting minimal effort into completing the task. To address this issue a novel approach was needed to encourage students to engage in the session whilst remaining a purely formative task.